September 2017

09/23/2017

"There are few exhibitions that make one want to stand back and take a deep breath, but this is the feeling I had from the first room of You Yangs paintings. It's the same feeling I've had looking at exhibitions by Cezanne, Picasso and Braque. From the oldest landscape in the world, an artist had created something we'd never seen before".

09/10/2017

Notes for the "TIMES LIKE THESE" paintings shown at the ART COLLECTIVE WA, 1-29 JULY 2017

In 2013, at the last of the MOMA in Perth shows, at AGWA, titled “Van Gogh, Dali, and Beyond - The World Reimagined” two small paintings, just to the left as you entered, stopped me in my tracks. The first, just 35cm x 41cm was Andre Derain’s “L’Estaque”, painted in 1906. Beside it, a little larger, 48cm x 70cm, was “Church at Murnau” by Vassily Kandinsky, painted in 1909. Beyond, the rest of an excellently curated collection of 20th Century art from the MOMA collection that included many old favourites could not keep me from wanting to return to those two little attention grabbers with their charged and almost luminous colour contrasts and tensions.

The experience was a timely reassurance of the place that the purely visual medium of painting still holds. Also, in keeping with the tradition of non-linear progression of art, a need to re-visit the period that produced these paintings.

It is astounding that Derain and Matisse painted the dynamic Fauve works over four years, 1904 to 1908. In that period they abstracted colour, setting brilliant, sometimes primary colours near and against each other and allowing the colour to be a compositional element. Kandinsky visited them in 1906, and with other German Expressionists, in particular Alexei Jawlensky and Karl Schmidt- Rottluff further simplified their paintings with flat areas of strong, often complementary colours providing form. A year after painting “Church at Murnau”, in 1910, Kandinsky made what is regarded as the first abstract painting, without any reference to, or attempt to imitate nature. The 1914-18 war prematurely ended that special decade.

Researching the period, and later seeing some of the Expressionist paintings in galleries in Cologne and Dusseldorf, I was both invigorated and reassured that form and colour could be enough. Getting back to work, a more spontaneous and autonomous approach to composition evolved; going with the large, flat areas of strong colour working together to form the composition.

“Times Like These” is the sub-title of the paintings made in the last six months. The first part of the title refers to the sequence in which they are painted. Making the paintings, in a period with so many loud distractions, provided insulation and sanctuary. Hopefully, looking at them can do a bit of the same.